


more than the shadows of each other

by paradoxpangolin



Series: i was made for loving you [2]
Category: Deca-Dence (Anime)
Genre: Autistic Minato, Gen, Idiots in Love, M/M, Memory Loss, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Canon, The Memory Loss Is Not As Sad As You Think It Will Be, Yet., scrambled eggs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:53:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27297445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paradoxpangolin/pseuds/paradoxpangolin
Summary: The light comes back into Kabu slowly, first coursing down the cables to his back, then setting the oxyone aglow. It bubbles as it drips out into empty pathways, into his waiting system, bringing the life back home. Minato feels the buzz all the way up his arm when the small static field leaps into being, and as Kabu’s internal motors all kick on one by one, that anxious silence drains away.Kabu’s screen flickers. Minato feels paralyzed, locked into place by the circuit between them. Blazingly white, then dark static blue, then teal. The lines of his face come back online, and Kabu opens his eyes.
Relationships: Kaburagi/Minato (Deca-Dence), Minato & Natsume (Deca-Dence)
Series: i was made for loving you [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1944952
Comments: 6
Kudos: 63





	more than the shadows of each other

**Author's Note:**

> hau ak
> 
> so that was a finale huh

Part of Minato thinks it can’t be real. It hasn’t felt real since before they found the backup, not through the time Minato’s spent with Jill piecing Kabu back together, not through the welding his dented limbs whole again, not through cleaning the shards of glass out of the crater of his face. He had pruned the ends of the cauterized circuits, clipping out the charred parts and splicing new wiring in. He had replaced the screws and oiled the hard to reach places in Kabu’s joints, scrubbed away the decades of untouched grime and mold. He had memorized Kabu’s code, inside out and backwards, until it was like wrapping himself up in the only blanket that still held Kabu’s scent. It still feels like it cannot ever be real. As if he’s dreaming. _He gets to show Kabu dreaming._

Minato sits back on his heels, rubbing at his eyes. The bookshelf makes more sense in alphabetical order, he knows, but it looks much better in color order. His fingers twitch, desperate for something else to do. Or size…? Or he could water the plants again. Or he could remake the bed, or rearrange the cabinets, or go back up to the blimp and check and recheck things up there. Twenty-four hours, five minutes and thirteen seconds ago, he’d slid Kabu’s new faceplate into place and wiped off the dust and it had hit him that _it was almost time._

Kabu’s code watches him, still, always pulled up in the corner of his UI. He’d laugh at Minato, wouldn’t he? For worrying so hard.

Sixteen hours, nine minutes and fifteen seconds ago, Jill had seen how his hands were trembling and ordered him out of their workshop. Fourteen hours, thirty-eight minutes and forty-nine seconds ago, she had threatened to block his account if he kept calling her. She promised he would be the first to know. That was fourteen hours, thirty-eight minutes and fifty seconds ago.

He gets to show Kabu the house. The house Minato had slowly moved into, first because it felt like Kabu wasn’t gone, then because he’d fallen in love. He gets to groan with Kabu over the floorboard by the door that still creaks, and warn him about the second step on the staircase to the brand new upper floor. He gets to tease Kabu about how old and hard and dusty his couch had been when they’d slept on it three years ago, and make him feel how soft the pillows he’d bought for it are now, and show him how to use a vacuum. Everything Minato passes, he imagines Kabu, impossibly real and seeing it for the first time. He’ll hear Kabu’s laugh when Minato tells him about all the names Natsume’s given his plants. See Kabu’s wry smile when he realizes how Minato has _cleaned_ for the first time either of them have lived here. He thinks about leading Kabu up the stairs and watching his face as he looks out the window, over the rooftop gardens and sunlit paths of the new city. He thinks about showing Kabu the quilts on the bed, the solar lights on the balcony, the life Minato has made.

All of it makes Minato _terrified_. It is a good kind of terrified, he thinks. He’s still learning about putting words to feelings he’s only now allowed to feel. It’s _him,_ it’s going to be _him._ He’s coming back. Minato gets the chance to show him everything he’s learned and tell him everything he hadn’t been able to before and never let go of him again.

It takes Minato a few seconds to hear the knocking coming from downstairs, and a few more for the idea to make it through his frayed circuits that he was expected to respond to it. He springs up, straightens the trinkets he’d found in Kabu’s workshop trash and put on the top of the bookshelf, brushes a fleck of dust off a pillow and then smooths the wrinkle out of the pillowcase, and darts down the stairs. He hopes it isn’t anyone important, or he won’t have time to change the curtains and dust out Kabu’s workshop again and sort the desk drawers –

“Oh, my god,” Natsume says, making some kind of face. Minato squints into the sunlight streaming in from behind her, the smell of the morning wind blowing through the door. That’s not right. It shouldn’t be morning yet. “Are you _okay?”_

Minato blinks at her. She sighs, pushes her way into his house, and pulls him behind her. “Were you really going to do this _today,_ when Boss is coming back?! Did you forget to eat this whole time, huh? Or even, like, sit down?” She shoves him down onto the couch, and Minato’s knees buckle with a weakness that takes him by surprise.

“No wonder Fei hates it when I stay up all night, is this what it’s _like_ for her??” Natsume grumbles. “You look like a dead person.”

“I’m – it’s, it’s okay, I’m fine,” Minato says, pulling himself to his feet with the arm of the chair. “We don’t, you know we don’t need to sleep like you do. There’s nothing wrong.”

“No, nope, shut up, stop talking,” Natsume says, and pushes him hard in the shoulder. Minato resists for a second before sitting back onto the couch in defeat. “Have you been like this all night? Or what? When was the last time you ate.”

“I, uh.” Minato rubs at his face. He can see the bags under Natsume’s eyes too, knows last night was anything but restful for her either. “Not since… since yesterday, I think. Jill made me leave.”

“You’re going to drop dead before you even get to _see_ Boss again! I’m going to have to tell him you died!” Natsume searches through his cabinets without pausing to ask. “You have like no food in your house.”

“Cyborg.” Minato blinks, and has to force his eyes back open. A question struggles through the fog in his processor to the front of his mind, one of the questions he’s been teaching himself to ask. “You’re human, though. Did you eat? Today?”

Natsume freezes guiltily, then closes the cabinets with a snap. “ _You’re_ not supposed to call me on that!”

“Well, you have to.” Minato makes a vague gesture.

“Okay. I’ll make something real quick for both of us. Don’t you dare help, you’re going to try and put a cup of nutmeg in it again.”

Minato fidgets with the threads on a pillow as Natsume throws things together in the tiny unchanged kitchen, concentrating on keeping his eyes from falling closed. He needs something to _do._ He pulls Kabu’s code up in front of his face and scrolls through it, more for comfort than anything else.

It’s what he always comes back to looking at, when he’s anxious or upset or can’t sleep. It makes it feel like Kabu is here again, almost. The variables are here that create his shy, soft smiles, his careful silences, his single-minded fury. Minato reads it over again, like a treasured script. He used to tell himself he was checking for mistakes, but after working so long he knows there are none. He just likes looking at Kabu.

Natsume sits down heavily on the couch next to him, and he startles. “Okay, here, eat. Breakfast for both of us.” She shoves something at his chest, and he takes it before he can see what it is.

It’s a plate of scrambled eggs.

“Oh.” Minato swallows, then breathes out. “I.”

“Hmm?”

He had never cried before Kabu died. Had never had a reason to. It was like a great, cascading systems crash, when it came, like some vital line of code holding him together had fallen away. Like he had forgotten how to breathe, in his avatar, forgotten how to move – curling into a shaking ball on the couch, his face hidden in Kabu’s old jacket, struggling to pull the air into his lungs. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop for so long. Until he was dizzy, and his head pounded whenever he sat up, the inside of his mouth down his throat sticky and raw. Text in the corner of his vision flashed that his avatar was dehydrated, so he’d pulled himself up and stumbled to the faucet, and drank until the water ran down and soaked his shirt, and thrown up into the sink, and sunk to the floor. That was the first few weeks.

He’d thought he had run out of tears, after so long, had exhausted the avatar’s astounding ability to produce them. The night after they’d found Kabu’s backup, he had finally understood what it meant and succumbed to deep, heaving sobs, that wracked his body and left his muscles sore the next day. But there had been no tears to come with them, then, as hysterical as he became. Now, though, he finds himself fighting to breathe. So much, so fast. Over a plate of eggs.

“Are – are you okay?” Natsume says, alarmed.

“Sorry, I,” Minato chokes. “I’m s-sorry, he just. H-he, he made me – “

 _“Oh.”_ Natsume sets her plate down hurriedly, grabbing Minato’s arm as he wipes at his face. “Don’t, don’t cry, stop it you’ll make me start c-c – “ She breaks off with a half-laugh sob and drops her head against Minato’s shoulder. “Y-you made me start too, you, you…”

“I’m sorry.” Minato snuffles and gulps in a deep breath, holding it tight in his throat. His face is warm, and wet. There are drops of water on his plate that weren’t there before.

“It’s okay, it was gonna happen eventually.” Natsume sniffs hard and wipes her nose on her hand, then smears it on Minato’s sleeve. Her shaky smirk dissolves too fast and she doubles over, and Minato can’t pretend to be angry at her. “I just, I can’t,” she gasps into her knees. Minato places one of his hands in the center of her back, still lost as to how else to help. “I can’t believe,” she says, “he’s coming back. What is – what is he going to _think?”_

“He. He loved you,” Minato says. This is one of the things he’d pieced together over the years. He knows it now. He understands its truth. “He’s not going to stop.”

“And, and what if, what if he, he’s _broken,_ or he just doesn’t turn on, or what if he’s like a blank slate, or he, he h-hates Tankers or he doesn’t _remember me – “_

“He _will,”_ Minato says pleadingly. “He will, because we made him that way, it’s going to be him, he’s going to come back and see everything we’ve done and he’s _not leaving,_ again, not this time.”

“I won’t let him,” Natsume growls. She sits up and puts her plate back on her lap. “You have to make him take care of himself,” she says through a massive bite of egg. “He never did. And it’s hard enough to remember for myself sometimes.”

“I promise,” Minato says. “I still can’t. I can’t _believe_ it.”

“What, that eggs don’t have to taste like charcoal?”

“You know what I meant.” Minato’s stomach is churning, in a way that could be tears or nerves or hunger. He picks up his breakfast and starts eating. It’s, well. It’s better than Kabu’s.

They sit and eat in silence, until Jill calls.

 _“Minato. You ready?”_ Minato jerks, hands clenching around his plate. Natsume’s head snaps up. Jill sounds tired, but she’s not a mess at all, of course.

“What’s happening?” Natsume hisses. “Is it Jill?”

Minato nods. His heart is beating very fast, but from far away, like it’s someone else’s body it’s shaking. _“I’m ready. Are you ready?”_

 _“Mmhm, everything is fully prepared.”_ She pauses, like she’s rehearsing something. _“I apologize for kicking you out earlier. I could have used your help, but I was afraid you were putting Kaburagi in danger.”_

 _“Oh…thank you.”_ Minato stands up mechanically and puts his food down on the table. _“And, thank you for taking it from there. I really can’t tell you how much it means to me.”_

Jill grunts. Minato can picture her awkwardly glancing away. _“Sure. You coming up or not?”_

“What’s going on? Is it time?” Natsume asks, springing to her feet. “Is everything okay?”

Minato closes the call with Jill. He can feel manic grin creeping up onto his face, without any instruction on his part. “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. He’s ready.”

Natsume’s hands fly up to cover her mouth, and she giggles breathlessly behind them. “Really? Seriously?!”

“It’s time, I – oh, shit, do you want to, do you want to come up? We can, we can find you a car, I’m not sure if humans can fit in our cars, I’m so sorry – “

“No. It’s okay.” Natsume squares her shoulders. “I decided. I have a tour today, so I’m going to go out. I’ll… I’ll see him when we get back.” She gives Minato an uncertain smile.

Minato wants to take her by the shoulders. “I promise it’s going to work. Me and Jill have checked him over so many times. He’s coming back. We’re bringing him _back.”_

“I know! I know. I believe you.” She swallows, then steps back and shovels the rest of her eggs into her mouth. “I believe you. I do,” she repeats. “I’ll see you later.”

He watches her until she leaves, pulling the door closed behind her hard enough so it doesn’t stick. Then he picks the plates up off the table and takes them over and puts them in the sink. Then he goes upstairs, his hands are trembling again, to log out.

When he opens his eyes back in his body, Jill is waiting for him, anxiously clicking her tablet open and shut. “I’ve looked over the process backwards and forwards and tested every component individually,” she says before he steps off the platform. “Everything is go. It’s just powering up, now.”

“You’re sure everything is ready? You’re positive this will work?” Minato says as she walks with him down the hall.

“No one’s ever done this before. I’m as sure as I can be. But…” Jill glances up at him and smirks. “I am _very_ good at my job. Now, remember. He won’t be able to recall anything after the point where I took the backup. Everything past that is corrupted data.”

“And you don’t think he’ll be able to access any of it?” It’s something they’ve talked about before, that had seemed suddenly obvious to Minato as soon as Jill had mentioned it. He won’t remember being Kabu-dence, or fighting alongside Minato one last time. The last thing he’ll remember of Minato, outside of a few urgent exchanges, is Minato’s own refusal to say goodbye.

“With the extent of the damage? You saw the state of his original wiring when we started working on the backup. I’d say they’re unsalvageable.”

Minato doesn’t know why he keeps asking the question, even though he knows the answer. It’s something he cannot stop, like unfolding and folding his fingers, letting them flutter and spin. The two of them had set their workshop up close to the login room, but it isn’t close enough. The hall is so long. Minato wants to run.

The mountain of problems waiting for him to come back only grows every day. Some days it feels like the new system is fighting against him, chiseling into his weak points and skewing off destructively in arbitrary ways. Some days he feels like anyone would be a better administrator than him, the glorified mascot, placed in real authority for the first time and told to be competent for once. Some days he thinks it would be better, easier, happier, to just leave the new system to its own devices. Let it do the choosing for him. It must know more about the world. But this, building Kabu back up, learning him and loving him, is the one thing he can trust himself to know. He owes Kabu that much, to keep knowing it, to keep remembering.

It’s become soothing. Calming. It makes him feel less alone. Strange to think he won’t have that work to fall back on, soon, and almost upsetting, until he remembers what that work being done means. Everything won’t be fixed, with Kabu back. He’s rational enough to know that. But it will be… better. It will be good again.

And Minato will convince him of everything he couldn’t tell him before. He won’t be a coward, torn between the system and the truth. He can’t exist like that anymore. Minato will say anything and everything Kabu needs, score open his mind and lay the evidence at Kabu’s feet, so that Kabu will learn, finally, how much Minato loves him. Minato will make him know _,_ this time _,_ make him _understand_. Make him stay.

Jill’s cleaned up the workshop. Why is that the thing he notices? Kabu’s body is there, waiting, on the workbench. Dark and hunched, wires and tubes anchoring his back to the computer terminal behind him. Minato wishes he could say it looks like he’s just in the midst of a reboot, or logged in to his avatar, but he’s spent too much time with this body as a dead piece of metal to believe that anymore. He can imagine it, though. It wasn’t something he’d had much practice with, before, so he’s been making up for lost time. Imagining Kabu full of life again, screen glowing and warm, the buzz of his voicebox as he speaks.

“His oxyone is filled and ready. I triple checked everything, before you ask,” Jill says, scooting behind him to start up the computer. “We have his cerebral cable here, and the nervous cable, that we replaced last week, and the sensory cable. The motor pathways are connected with the computer’s battery, which is connected with his oxyone tank…” She breaks off and drags her hands down her face before going back to the terminal. “I’m chattering. So it should be just like a reboot, just initiated from an outside point.”

It’s something they’ve gone over time after time after time. It’s a process like the oxyone flowing to Minato’s core. Minato’s leg points click against the floor, as he lights down. There’s not a smudge or scratch on Kabu’s face, though the glue pushes out from the seams where the glass meets the metal in places. Minato had used the flat blade of his own finger to smooth that glue evenly, along the frame. He had never made it level, but he had made it perfect.

He touches Kabu. Ghosts his hand up the side of his body, cups the corner of his frame. He can’t help it.

“Okay,” Jill says. “Let’s do this.”

The light comes back into Kabu slowly, first coursing down the cables to his back, then setting the oxyone aglow. It bubbles as it drips out into empty pathways, into his waiting system, bringing the life back home. Minato feels the buzz all the way up his arm when the small static field leaps into being, and as Kabu’s internal motors all kick on one by one, that anxious silence drains away.

Kabu’s screen flickers. Minato feels paralyzed, locked into place by the circuit between them. Blazingly white, then dark static blue, then teal. The lines of his face come back online, and Kabu opens his eyes.

He blinks, in slow jerky movements, animations lagged by the sheer load of activity through his motherboard. His eyes skip up to Minato. A wrinkle of a line appears between them. He looks confused, and a little stunned. “ _Minato?”_

If Minato could cry, he would cry again. Strange, for certain, to feel it somehow without a throat. He clutches the corner of Kabu’s face. There’s nothing to block his words, but he tries to swallow, uselessly, around a lump that doesn’t exist.

“Welcome back, Kaburagi,” Jill says, sounding so, so distant. “We managed to recover you from a backup after you were killed in the fight against the omega. You’ve been gone for about three years.”

“Hi,” Minato chokes out. “Hi, Kabu.” He can’t say anything else. “Hi, hi, hi.”

“Three years?” Kabu asks. “What, what ha-aAUHH – “ His screen boils into a tangle of searing colors. Minato’s other hand flies up and Kabu spasms, grabbing at his arms, fingers rigid and seizing, making sounds that Minato’s never heard a person make before. Minato’s world collapses to a single point, his systems overheating, his vision heaving with alarms. _No, no, I just, I just got you back, you can’t you CAN’T –_ He clutches Kabu close, delirious with terror. “Jill! _Jill!!”_

Jill is already rushing from the computer to Minato’s side, scrambling onto the workbench and kneeling beside Kabu’s twitching body. _“Kaburagi!_ Listen to me, Kaburagi,” she demands. Kabu’s hands tremor, clamped like vices to Minato’s arms, and a garbling whine escapes his speakers. Minato feels sick. Jill grabs onto two of his head points and shakes, rattling him against the table. “You’re trying to access data that was corrupted by your death. You’ll damage yourself, you need to _stop!”_

After a moment, Kabu’s shuddering fades. He looks back up. The glitches retreat from his face. Minato distantly hears his own fans coming down from overdrive, the sound jumping and stuttering with lag. He feels about to fall apart. Kabu can’t do that again. He can’t do that again. “N-natsume?” Kabu croaks.

“Natsume’s okay. Natsume’s wonderful.” Minato leans in dazedly and rests his forehead against Kabu’s frame. Kabu tips his face up, clicking their screens together. Minato feels like he’s running on fumes, all of a sudden. Slow and hazy and tired. The tremors have come back into his hands like a band of elastic let slack. Minato closes his eyes and scrapes his thumbs over Kabu’s face. Kabu squeezes Minato’s arms, and Minato’s face breaks finally into a wide, grateful smile. “You saved all of us,” he says. He keeps expecting his breath to catch. “Kabu, I’m so _happy_.”

Kabu pushes his face into Minato’s hand, in a way Minato thinks must be reflexive. “I did?” he says, almost dreamy. “What happened?”

“In short, the Deca-Dence shutdown was prevented and the omega was destroyed,” says Jill, “but not without significant damage to the fortress. Your body was crushed by falling debris. That should be the extent of your corrupted memory files.”

Kabu’s expression turns inward, like he’s thinking about something hard. “We discussed this beforehand,” Minato breaks in anxiously. “I put together a, a package, of files for you. Memory files of – everything, given to us by several people. We can talk about it.” Minato’s own memories, some. His half-defeated laughter as Kabu asked again for Minato to join him. Helping him settle into the core, wanting to hold his hand as the machinery clanked into place. Fighting together, perfectly in touch, one last time. _Thank you, Commander Minato._ “Everything important is in there. Don’t worry.” He wants to never hear Kabu make that sound again.

That startled half-second look comes back on Kabu’s face. The one he gets when someone does anything for him he didn’t expect. “Oh,” he says. His eyes flick around the room. “Oh. Where’s…”

“Natsume? She’s down on the surface. She’s waiting for you.”

“She is?” Kabu asks, hands tightening around Minato’s arms. There’s a smile fading onto his face, at last, careful and small like it’s not sure it’s welcome. It makes Minato giddy. “Can I see her?”

“Of course! You should see what she does now.” Minato takes Kabu’s hands and tugs him off the table, onto the stepping block they’d only just remembered to put there for him. “You… _know_ Natsume?” Kabu says, still a little unsteady on his feet. He makes no move to let go of Minato’s hands.

“I told you, she’s wonderful. But you knew that.” Minato guides Kabu to step down to the floor, testing the joints in his legs.

“It’s been three years, Kaburagi. _Everyone_ knows Natsume,” Jill adds. “How are you feeling? All systems running normally? Aside from the corruption, which should be fairly well isolated from everything else if you don’t go digging in it too much?”

Kabu stops for a second. Minato is about to worry, but then he says, “Yeah. Everything’s fine. Thank you, Jill. Minato.” He looks up to Jill, still on the table. “Wait, Natsume hasn’t – “

“I fixed up your old avatar, too!” Minato says. “We can go straight down there and see her.”

“Plus she like definitely saw your de – “ Jill mumbles.

“Thank you, Minato,” Kabu repeats. Minato’s too preoccupied to shoot Jill a glare. Now he’s on his feet Kabu looks fragile and drained, as if pulling himself back from the corruption had used too much of his charge. Minato feels it too. His hands have stopped shaking, at long last, but the fumes in his tank will only have the power to keep him standing for so long.

“I’m ready. Let’s go,” Kabu says. His joints move smooth, without a catch or a squeal. His face shines dazzlingly bright through his screen. He might be what beautiful looks like. After a step he pauses, suddenly uncertain. “And what about…after that?” he says, searching Minato’s face. “What _happens_ now, Minato?”

Minato remembers a strong warm arm holding him in place as he floats up from sleep, of burying himself in the smell of Kabu as Kabu makes sweet snuffling snores and does not wake. He remembers quiet sunlight and careful matched breathing, and what it was like to be clung to in the morning, without hesitation or fear. “Can we just, go to sleep again, first? Together?”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you SO MUCH to the d-d server!! yall r instrumental. your contributions will be featured in the future. =)


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